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Curious how top manufacturers design the next generation of fiberglass windows and doors? In this episode, you will hear how MITER Brands brought the Milgard C700 fiberglass window line to life. The conversation explores practical innovations, the role of automation, and how teamwork creates better products for both dealers and homeowners.
What You’ll Learn
Episode Highlights 02:15 – Why fiberglass windows require different manufacturing methods 06:40 – How the C700 project started and what problems it solves 15:05 – What automation looks like in a modern factory 21:30 – How new corner designs prevent water leaks
Meet the Guests Viktor Stantsiyer leads product engineering at Milgard. Mike Barton directs operations at Tacoma Manufacturing. They both have experience launching new products and improving manufacturing processes.
Tools, Frameworks, or Strategies Mentioned
Welcome to the Clear Impact Podcast brought to you by MITRE Brands University.
Thanks for joining us today.
My name is Sherry Conner and I am your host.
All right, so good afternoon.
We are here on the Clear Impact Podcast and we're recording in Tacoma.
These two gentlemen were both on the docket for recording with me and they decided to
come in together, which is really fun.
Love the interaction.
So I'm going to let you guys introduce yourselves and then you can talk about what your role
is and then we'll circle back to the C700.
So we'll start here.
Yeah, my name is Victor Stance here.
I'm the brand new director of product engineering here at MailGuard just starting that
role up right now before that senior engineer on the new product design team.
Awesome.
And how long have you been with the company?
I've been with the company from 2018.
I left for a year and then I came back because I missed it so much.
Well, that's a nice way to say that.
So eight, seven years, ish.
Yeah.
Okay, and you?
My name is Mike Barton.
I am the director of operations for Tacoma Manufacturing.
I've been with the company 18 years now.
Wow.
Yeah.
That's amazing.
It's been a good ride.
Always in operations.
No, actually I started out in the engineering group.
And so I have a little bit of a unique perspective and probably why we decided to partner up on
this code.
We want to really build that relationship between engineering and ops.
Well, yeah, because engineering comes up with a great idea is that operations has to pull
it off.
Absolutely.
So it is good for you guys to be aligned.
Yeah.
It is.
Right.
Because otherwise you're like, it's extremely important for us to be aligned.
Yeah.
Because otherwise you're like, what?
Who designed this?
How are we supposed to do that?
Well, that's actually how I got into operations.
The previous engineering manager at the company said, if you ever want to see how poorly
your designs perform, go to operations and see, like you design it, it's in this computer
model, everything looks really, really good.
It works great on paper, but when you go and translates to the floor, it may not work
as good as you think.
So that's actually what led me in the path to get into operations is to help translate
engineering work into production.
Oh, okay.
Yeah.
That's a great perspective.
I love that.
So let's talk about the C700.
Yeah.
The C700 is our brand new redesigned fiberglass project.
So it's replacing the C650.
It's brand new design from the ground up, straight from the whiteboard all the way through.
So we started off with the spec document really trying to understand what the customer wants
and needs are where we're maybe lacking on our old product, where we could improve on
our new product.
To my point, just understanding the manufacturer ability of fiberglass, I can also speak on
fiberglass as a very difficult thing to manufacture and use from corner joinery to fitment to
tolerancing everything about it is much more difficult than vinyl or you can just weld
and there's a lot more flexibility there.
All right.
And so have you had your hand on this since the beginning?
Yeah.
So I started off on it a little bit, then I got moved on some other projects, but I've
been brought back on, so I've been kind of helping out at the final hour, really getting
things across the finish line, helping with testing, helping with the final deliverables
and working with production to help us start building it.
Okay.
And so Mike, tell me about the C700.
Sure.
So I've actually got to see this from a couple of different perspectives.
When we first started conceiving of this product, I was over internal supply and to Victor's
point, fiberglass is a little bit different animal in terms of how the sticks are produced.
So we spent a lot of time working with the engineers to basically design for pull-trutability,
make it so that we can get better yield out of the gate, make it easier to tune and produce.
Even on the painting side, we spent a lot of time figuring out how to terminate the paint,
how it's going to be hung, how it's going to be run through the machine.
So I got a unique perspective up front as they were developing and designing the shapes
and profiles.
And then somewhere in the middle of it, I transitioned over to the manufacturing side, right as we're
starting to set the first piece of equipment on the floor and really get involved and own
it from kind of the back-end side of it as well.
Okay.
And so forgive me, I don't know very much about fiberglass.
I did have a chance to or the pull-trusion plant this summer, but I don't recall.
Is the paint applied to the raw sticks or is it applied after the product is assembled?
It's coated in the raw sticks phase.
Okay.
So essentially we'll build up a supermarket of inventory in the raw and then we'll paint
to order.
Oh, okay.
Yeah.
And so we have two painting processes.
One is a powder coat process.
A coat which is typically an electrostatic process used for coating metals.
We've adopted it to coat fiberglass using thermal stacks, so we use heat to actually draw the
powders to the profile and coat.
And then we have a wet coat process which allows us to do dual color on the same profile.
Oh, okay.
Yeah.
So that's where you can get the color that you want on the outside but have a white on
the inside.
Correct.
Yes.
Right.
And so what challenges were there on the C700?
Yeah, for sure.
So to my point, you know, when you talk about powder coat and you talk about dual coat,
which is wet coat, from a design perspective, that makes it challenging because as design
engineers we have to look at tolerances constantly.
So every single piece that snaps together, there's a tolerance to that.
When you're making a piece of profile, nothing comes out exactly to the 0.001 of a decimal
every single time.
No.
No, it doesn't.
So you have to start to account for your tolerancing, but then when you take things
into account, well, there's a whole different paint process and the buildup of that.
So we learned a lot of things working with protrusion.
And in some cases, we actually decided to have different profiles made specifically for
like a wet coat process versus a powder coat process just to help us through those tolerancing
issues.
The other thing is maybe Mike can speak more to it, but I don't work over there on the
protrusion side and there's a lot of rovings and mats that go in, but as you're designing
features, you got to work really closely with the team and say, hey, I want this unique
feature in this profile.
Is that something that's doable?
Am I going to get the strength that I need?
So it's a lot of back and forth and understanding, okay, this is how it's actually going to be
made where the rovings and the mats go in so that you know whether or not you have the
strength for that feature or you can build that feature.
Okay.
I need you to make some definitions for me.
What are rovings and mats, but I don't know what that is.
So I can speak to that since I spent some time in protrusion.
So the rovings are essentially unidirectional, fiberglass strands, so think of it as a piece
of yarn that's made out of really fine fibers of glass.
The mat is essentially those same rovings that are chopped up and lightly glued together
to form kind of a veil, if you will, and that veil is cut to width and essentially wraps
the entire exterior perimeter of the profile and also the interior hollows.
So to Victor's point, like as we design these shapes that are maybe one inch by one and
a half inch tall, there's a lot of material that has to feed into the die to make it work
and some of those geometry's get really complex.
So there's a lot of back and forth with the engineering team and the protrusion team
to make sure that what the engineers wanted was feasible and if it wasn't, what could
we do to compromise to get something that worked the same?
So it's not like a vinyl or an aluminum where you run it through some sort of CNC machine.
It's built that way.
Yeah.
So even with vinyl.
So vinyl is an extrusion process where it goes through a die and you get a stick with
a continuous 2D profile all the way down.
Fiverglass is the same, but the manufacturing process is quite different.
You're drawing these rovings in the mat through a die and you're actually dredging the
rovings through a vat of resin as it goes into the die then it cures to create that same
2D profile, the continuous length of the part.
Okay.
But then there's still like if you have cutouts for hardware and things like that that's
done through a die process?
No, that's done through a CNC process.
A CNC, okay.
So that's a little bit unique to how we manufacture, so switching gears from how we make the stick
to how we make the frame, a lot of new equipment, in fact we've asked our equipment vendors
to do a lot of things that hadn't been done before and talking to Joseph, the manufacturers
or fabrication equipment, to this point the largest or the most axes they put into a fabrication
machine is 22.
Our most complex machine has 32 axes of motion to create the fabs and the profiles.
Wow.
So it's doing a lot and on top of that fiberglass is very abrasive.
So when you cut it and you don't clean it up, it gets into the gears and the motors
and the bearings and wears out the equipment quite rapidly.
So we asked them to do a lot around desk collection, desk mitigation and control to keep
the machines cleaner, which will run longer, less wear and tear and all that good stuff.
So even just on the fab side a lot of stuff that hadn't been done before.
Wow.
Yeah.
That's really revolutionary though.
It is.
Okay.
I'm understanding it a little better now.
Thank you.
Okay.
Kind of going back to your question to what's some of the challenges we've faced with C700,
the fiberglass.
We talked about the profiles themselves, but another key one that I wanted to mention
was corner joinery.
So when you think of a traditional vinyl window, that's welded together.
Right.
So you've got some heat on it, you weld it and essentially sealed.
So you don't really have to worry too much about water management.
Although you still got to get water out of channels and stuff like that, but the internal
hollows are sealed off.
With fiberglass, you can't weld it.
You can't put heat on it and just stick it together.
So it's called a mechanically joined corner.
So we've done a lot of work designing very custom corner keys with injection ports and
all sorts of flow paths for our hot melt.
So what we do is we'll, and we've got a piece of equipment that we'll talk about in a
little bit, but essentially it was designed so that you put a corner key in.
You put the four pieces together and then you screw the corner keys into place and then
you've got an injection port where you can put hot melt and it will go along these flow
paths within our keys and really just seal the corner.
So then we don't have the water issue.
So that's a really new and it was a challenging and fun experiment.
I mean, we were 3D printing translucent profiles just so that we could watch the flow path
of the hot melt go through so that we can confirm that, yeah, it's doing what we wanted
to do.
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Oh, spoken like such an engineer.
I love it.
That's cool though.
That's a really smart way to see it and to test it.
Now the question becomes how do you make that repeatable?
How do you give that to manufacturing and say, hey, here's this cool thing we did.
Do it every day.
All day.
Right.
So we actually reached out again to working with equipment vendors and we have our own
custom piece of equipment.
It's from Erdman if I'm not mistaken.
And it's a corner joinery machine.
So if you drive fit the pieces together, put it on the pieces of on a conveyor belt, it
goes into the machine, it puts the screws into your corner keys, it injects the hot melt
and then it goes a little bit further down and then you put your back bedding on and then
it tilts it up ready to go down the line.
So does all of that automatically affect?
I think that's one of the great features of this product, fiberglass is a very heavy product
and with fiberglass comes strength, strength comes bigger sizes.
And looking at how we assemble the old C650 product, it's a lot of manual movement, takes
a lot of people to move heavy stuff.
There's a lot of thoughtful automation so you were not really handling the window until
it comes out as an assembled unit and then it goes on a cart.
So a lot of thought put into not just how to design and make the corner joinery better
and the profile is better but how to produce it better even.
Wow.
Yeah.
It's awesome.
Yeah, it's really cool.
And so let's talk about the testing a little bit.
So you talked about printing in clear translucent so that you could see where the hot melt was
coming through.
What other kinds of testing did you have to go through on this?
Yeah, so there's actually a lot of testing involved with engineering if you believe
me or not.
Yeah, no, I'm sure there is.
We start off with a lot of component testing.
So corner keys, we 3D print objects, we'll do corner keys and test those out with hot
melt injection.
But we also have a whole materials lab that is set up here at the 10-10 building.
Okay.
Really cool materials lab, probably every single piece of equipment you can think of
is there.
So really it starts with that level of testing.
As we're working through fiberglass profiles, as we're working through designs, a 3D print
something maybe to figure something out, the other thing is you get fiberglass samples
that come back from protrusion and then we do tensile strength testing, we do compression
testing, we do all sorts of testing on it just to understand what it is that we're getting
and what we're designing around, because ultimately it leads us into what we call certification
testing.
Certification testing is really your air water structural, what a few others, but that
is the goal we got to get through all of our certification testing and we have to test
every single configuration that we build.
So it's a very huge test plan, I mean we're talking 6080 window configurations that need
to be tested at max sizes and then if there's any downsize testing for stronger rating,
but we do all the component level testing so that we are in a place where we feel very
confident when we go into cert testing and we've been able to see that by doing a lot of
this initial component testing when it comes time to do the cert testing, we're getting
the structural numbers that we're shooting for, there's still some R&D that goes on during
any sort of testing, but it's a lot less than before where you really don't know the material
that you're working with, you don't know exactly how things like I said, even the hot
melt flowing into the corner, if you didn't understand that and then you go to a water test
and you've got leaking corners, you might say, well I don't know what's going on, you're
trying to fix it and really by starting in the beginning and doing that component testing,
then we were able to mitigate a lot of that back in.
Okay, I like that.
So you have never before used equipment in the manufacturing, we had to adjust the recipe
for lack of a better word for the fiberglass and then train people on how to load the
machines properly and then how to offload and package, which is probably very similar
to what you've been doing.
Actually, a little bit different.
Is it?
Yeah, quite a bit different actually.
Okay.
So from the start, I think there's been a really good relationship between engineering
and manufacturing, which is what allows us to make this all possible.
From the time we set the first piece of equipment on the ground, we had team members come over
from C650 to learn the new process to work with the engineers to understand the intent
of the design and of the process and then work with them to troubleshoot where there
were gaps in that intent and as more team members came over to work on it to learn a different
way of building, right?
What used to take five people might now take three people.
What we used to do in five minutes now takes two minutes and just all the way down through
all the different steps, learning, training, developing, cross-training, building a diverse
workforce, even down the packaging where we now have a cut to size cardboard.
We have automated plastic wrapping and banding as it comes out the end.
So just completely different from tip to tail, but integrating production with the engineering
team as we developed and set stuff on the floor and commissioned it really helps us get
us a leg up on when we go to launch.
That's amazing.
I love that.
So we have a product launch protocol for PGT, but it's like a small batch production.
It's, you know, hey, we're going to toy with this window and we're going to build them
by hand and get the bugs out and do test runs with our dealer audience and get the feedback
from the field.
But that's not like an entire product launch with brand new equipment and brand new recipes
on the frame types.
That's amazing.
I am understanding now why I'm here and talking about this.
This is, wow.
And we've actually seen that process from afar and actually adopted the ILAB concept
up here in Tacoma.
And I love the concept of ILAB, especially when you have a design that we might not have
a market for to test it out and try new things with this.
We have a known market, we have a known product and something that's very long in the tooth
in the C650 product that we need to replace.
It makes sense to kind of move towards a more mass production right out of the gate process.
We know, again, we know there's demand.
We just have to figure it out and build it.
No, it totally makes sense just from a sales perspective, but it's just very different
than what I've been exposed to.
Well, I'll take even a step further, specifically for this project.
I mean, we're not limiting to just a whole new product line.
I mean, this is a whole new facility, essentially.
We emptied the whole warehouse.
We cleaned it up, brand new floors, painted everything, fixed everything up.
I might can talk about it more, but I mean, we really went all out with this project.
It's not just, oh, it's every window, which is already an achievement, but it's like
from the manufacturing, from the start, before we put any piece of equipment in, I mean,
we made sure that the building was ready to receive this project.
Nice.
We're designing the product of the future for fiberglass.
We want to have the manufacturing facility of the future to support it and the equipment
of the future to support it as well.
So it's kind of an all-encompassing package when you look at it.
Wow.
That's awesome.
All right, so we get to put a bow on it tonight, right?
Absolutely.
We have a party with our key customers and Steve Moore and I just had a conversation
about that and really focusing on the customers that are going to embrace it and promote it
and really do right by the product and not just whoever wants it, which I think is so
smart.
So is there anything else that we need to chat about with the C700?
I think the last piece that I wanted to bring in, you know, we talked about the tab
centers with Joseph, the Erdman, and then packaging, but we kind of missed a piece
in between.
We talked about it just a little bit, but once it goes through a corner joinery, we
don't pick it up again at all until it's on a card and out the door.
And that's really done by a really cool, innovative line, which is our starts line.
And as your sashes are coming through, they're moved from station to station right in
front of the operator.
It's really a true manufacturing line where the product shows up.
You do your job.
It keeps going.
And then it gets to a point where the sash just marries up with the frame.
There's a lot of thought and process that goes into that.
So it's really coming out together.
They marry up and then they're out and it just keeps repeating like that.
That was really neat.
I thought we should mention it.
Yeah.
So the balancers aren't added by hand?
They are.
There's still some hand work that's done, but we don't have to physically pick up or manipulate
the windows to do it.
That's really nice.
So what's the approximate workforce over there?
Are you estimating?
Are going to be needed?
So I won't talk in specific numbers, but this was designed to take 30% of the labor
out of the process to build compared to the C650 product.
The question that I was going to ask is, well, are we worried about losing team members
who are having to lay people off?
And in my answers, no, like this window is designed to double or triple the volume of
C650.
Right.
So we can always use more people to build more windows.
Right.
So we'll be more efficient by 30% but with the volume, there's going to be plenty of jobs
to go around.
Yeah.
Well, that's what I was going to say.
You can save those roles for things that only people can do.
And if you're looking for that repeatability and that consistency, sometimes it is better
to have a machine do it.
Absolutely.
And these products are heavy.
Very heavy.
We have some doors that weigh north of 800 pounds.
Yeah.
And when you ask just a couple of people to get around and lift it, it's a lot of work.
So with this new process, we eliminate a lot of that heavy lifting.
Which makes everybody happy.
Absolutely.
And safer.
A hundred percent.
I know we have some sliding glass door panels in our Fort Myers facility that Chris
Kerwin and I talked about where we can do a five by 12 panel with laminated insulated
glass.
That maybe weighs like 800 pounds.
And so shout out to all the installers out there who are having to actually lift these
things and load them and unload them and put them into somebody's house.
But if you're manufacturing that product and you're on that line 10 or 12 hours a day,
that's a whole different kind of work.
And to be able to automate some of that and have lift assists in place and have automation
so that you're not killing your workforce.
You don't want to do that.
No.
Definitely not.
Well, this is amazing.
Good.
Thank you for helping educate us and educate me and the listeners.
And hopefully everybody will oon on and appreciate the product, but then to understand what
goes into it and what's behind it, I think is really helpful.
Very good.
Well gentlemen, I'll see you tonight.
Yeah, thank you for having us on.
Yeah.
Thank you very much for having us.
Yeah.
And this was a great way to have the conversation.
I don't know who his idea that was, but it was a good idea.
You didn't blame that on Dean.
It was Dean's idea.
Yeah.
I like Dean.
He's my fan.
Nice.
I'll see you tonight.
Thanks.
Perfect.
All right.
All right.
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